We are excited to announce the 2nd Annual Contemporary Narrative Therapy Conference- November 6-8, 2025. Space is limited to 175 participants.
This year's conference theme is "Narrative Therapy's Unfinished Projects" and will explore ideas, concepts, and practices in narrative therapy that were introduced by Michael White and David Epston but were left unfinished. Presentations will highlight how they are taking up these yet to be explored ideas in their thinking and areas of practice. During this unique workshop style conference we will offer participants an in depth look at the latest thinking in contemporary narrative therapy, and as always, show a narrative therapy that is expanding and on the move.​
Presenters at CNTC 2025
(1).jpeg)
David Epston- Narrative Therapy Co-Founder
We are honored to once again have David Epston as our opening Keynote Speaker. For the past decade David has been concerned about the ways in which narrative therapy been routinized and moved further and further away from its philosophical, theoretical, and political commitments. David has been encouraging the development of a Contemporary Narrative Therapy practice that both returns to narrative therapy's original theoretical and political aims and seeks the return of the "spirit of adventure," the discovery of the new, that he and Michael outlined as the heart and center of narrative therapy.
In his Keynote Address, David will discuss his recent fascination with pedagogies for teaching and learning narrative practice that are both ambitious and consistent with the philosophical and theoretical aims of narrative therapy.
​
Travis Heath- Narrative Therapist and Author
​​
Travis is a licensed psychologist and is an Associate Professor at San Diego State University where he serves as Chair of the Department of Counseling & School Psychology. His most recent work involves incorporating the work of Black abolitionist scholars into psychotherapy, community healing, and uprising. His writing has focused on the use of rap music in narrative therapy, working with persons entangled in the criminal injustice system in ways that maintain their dignity, narrative practice stories as pedagogy, a co-created questioning practice called reunion questions, and community healing strategies. He is co-author, with David Epston and Tom Carlson “Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography" released in June 2022 entitled. He also completed a video series of his clinical work in June of 2024 for Psychotherapy.net entitled, “Reimagining Multiculturalism: A Contemporary Narrative Approach.
​
Sanni Paljakka- Narrative Therapist and Author
Sanni Paljakka is a psychologist and Director of Training at the Calgary Narrative Collective. Her labors of love in life are divided into two intertwined "philosophical laboratories": her own therapy practice among clients from all walks of life, and the deeply felt responsibility of good teaching and training for the new generation of students of Narrative therapy. To that end, she writes, publishes and co-edits for the Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy with a particular interest in writing therapeutic documents, the notion of "love" and its absence in modern relationships, and the wicked therapeutic and moral dilemmas that arise in her work with both her clients and students. Sanni is the primary author of the book entitled "So You Want to do Narrative Therapy? Letters to an Aspiring Narrative Therapist" published by Routledge Press in 2024. The book represents a unique thinking guide to a reimagined narrative therapy that seeks to return rich story development to its rightful place at the center of thoughtful deliberation-of-life in narrative therapy practice.
Chris Hoff, Ph.D. LMFT- Host, Radical Therapist Podcast
Chris a narrative therapist, educator, podcaster, and founder of the California Family Institute. His work explores the intersection of therapy, poststructural theory, and speculative futures. Chris is known for his ability to translate complex ideas into pragmatic practices for clients and clinicians alike. He is the host of The Radical Therapist Podcast and co-editor of An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping (Thick Press). Chris’s teaching, writing, and consulting center the creative, relational, and political dimensions of helping and change.
Chris will be presenting his work on: "Bending Time: Narrative Practice in the Liminal, the Defutured, and the Not-Yet"
​
Iman Dadras, Ph.D. LMFT- Closing Keynote Speaker
Iman is an associate professor of Couple and Family Therapy program at Alliant International University, Los Angeles. His clinical and research interests are the sociopolitical ideology of the therapist, racial and political countertransference in therapy, and politics of psychotherapy in the neoliberal epoch.
We are excited to have Iman as our closing keynote speaker. Iman's keynote address is titled: ​
"The Unfinished Project of Narrative Therapy: A Foucauldian Critique"
This presentation frames narrative therapy’s unfinished project as a call to reclaim its Foucauldian philosophical roots. It urges a return to a praxis that does not merely reauthor but deconstructs and problematize that situates subjectivity within the socio-political matrices of its emergence, and that resists neoliberalism’s seductive endorsement of hyper-individualization. Additionally, this presentation aims to invite those clinican who practice narrative therapy to re-examine their foundational theoretical knowledge with a critical differentiation from dominant normative evidence-based therapeutic models. Only through such a re-engagement can narrative therapy fulfill its promise as a transformative critique of the subjugating stories we are made to live by and die for.